Best Practices: fine-tuning protection schedules (4042023)

Best Practices: fine-tuning protection schedules

When agents are being protected, the default protection schedule, 24/7 once per hour, is presented and many times it's chosen automatically. However, a custom schedule might be preferred especially in scenarios where the Core is performing additional tasks such as updating Virtual Standby, creating archives, replicating data to another Core, etc. Moreover, rollups and replications may get delayed and overlap with daily jobs. Jobs are blocking each other from execution as they are mutually exclusive. Last, if a hypervisor is protected, a time window must be set up to backup the host system when no virtual machine protection is running to avoid that the quiescing of the hypervisor affects the backup of the guest system.

Simple Mode

Default 24/7 protection scenario is usually not the best one. It's recommended to set up a protection scenario, so it'll follow the time when server content is being changed by users. The default protection schedule then should be a 'workday', which is overlapping normal user's workday scenario.

For example, a file server and people are working from 9:00 AM till 7:00 PM. Then, the protection schedule can be set between 8:00 AM and 8:05 PM. The five additional minutes will ensure that the last backup of the business day will run even if there are delays from queuing backup jobs for other protected machines or other tasks that the Core might be running. Frequency can be, on the example, every 3 hours, more or less, depending on how often things are changed on the server. On the image example, no backups will be taken from 8:05 PM until the next morning. Furthermore, during the weekend, backups are taken every 4 hours.

Another example could be the Active Directory Domain Controller. Such server can be backed once a day, especially because usually there are multiple DCs in the environment. From the image (assuming that it is selected), the backup of the AD controller will be every day at 3:15 AM. Adding 15 minutes will prevent conflict with other programs that could be using Windows VSS or other snapshot systems that run at the hour. Daily protection time includes the weekend.

One last example (not illustrated on the image) can be an on-premises Exchange Server. For this type of server, it is recommended to leave the default 24/7 scenario because emails arrive all the time around the clock.

 

Advanced Mode

All the scenarios illustrated using Simple mode can also be set on Advance mode (Simple and Advance mode can be toggled by clicking the link on the upper right corner of the Protection Schedule dialogue box). However, there is a situation that can only be achieved by setting the schedule in Advance mode: adding a gap in the schedule.

When backing up a virtual center, it is recommended to pause any hosted machine by leaving a gap in the schedule. In the image, no backups are scheduled to run between 8:05 AM and 11:00 PM. If the backup of the hypervisor is set to run at 9:00 PM, the 3-hours window provides an additional hour for any backup still running after 8:00 PM to complete and a 2-hour period to protect the virtual center.

The gap between midnight and 2:00 AM is set for the Core nightly jobs to complete and to avoid conflict between jobs. Notice that on the 2:00 AM and 7:55 AM period, a backup job will initiate at 2:00 AM and 5:00 AM. Then, another backup will start at 8:00 AM triggered by the next period.

 

Information regarding adding protection periods and creating schedule templates can be found on the Rapid Recovery User Guide.

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